Then your superior virtual airline should be washing them out in training. You should never meet a sub par hire from Mesa as your FO. If they are making it to the line, then your training department has considered them satisfactory.
As to your corpie comment, seriously, or are you just stirring the pot?
Airlines are desperate. They’ll be scraping bottom barrel. Some already have.
Corpie comments, it’s a generalization, yes. But it definitely seems to be the case for Corpie going first 121 airline at a major. The few issues I’ve had that were like (dude, what?!) were Corpies. My guess is because most of them fly as CAs who just switch each leg, but they’re always CAs. When they cut over, some just don’t get that they are a FO and their role should be that as a supportive role (and assertive when needed).
I had one Corpie add fuel without even telling / discussing with me.
Another Corpie…
Our ETOPs procedure has one guy load the box, the other checks flight plan waypoints in ETOPs segment and circles them. He did both. I only mention lightly if he loads the box, I’m supposed to do the circling. Corpie pushes back that he always does it and no one minds. First leg ever together, I let it go. Well that was a mistake.
We are going to Hawaii and cruising. Down the road, we decide to climb. Sent off a climb request through CPDLC. Message comes back, climb to FL360, report level 360. I hit accept, dialed up the altitude, and was about to push alt intervene to climb when the Corpie tells me STOP. I was like ??? Says we can’t climb right now. I’m still confused. He says we can’t climb until our “accept” shows as “Sent” in our CPDLC screen. I’m like aroo? We are already cleared to climb. Corpie pushes back. Now normally, CPDLC comes/goes quick. But this one is taking a while to show our “accept” as sent. So I told him, we have been cleared to climb, so why not just climb? He went off how he flew G4s across the Atlantic and never did that. And how 90% of CAs do it this way. (PRO TIP: when you hear 90% of CAs do something, actual translation is not many do this, but I’m saying this anyway to show I’m right). I told him we are ADS-C and they can see us in real time. If we climb, they’ll know. And we have been cleared. Finally message goes through showing as “sent” and then we climb. Then I asked him, the “sent” simply means that our CPDLC sent our “accept” message to that oceanic controller. It doesn’t mean the controller actually saw and/or acknowledged it. Corpie had no response. Said it’s how he did it in Gulfstreams. One crossing and by the time we landed I could tell he was used to his Corpie way of doing things, and not our airline way.
(I followed up with our training department, they confirmed we can climb via our CPDLC accept message with no requirement to wait for the accept prompt showing as ‘sent’). They said you’ve already been cleared officially so go. There is no requirement to stay level and wait for the CPDLC to show the accept as sent.
I’m sure some Corpies are just fine. But when I see Beef Supreme behavior, that is Corpie personified. ZERO surprise for me.
